Dealing With Bandwidth Demand

The Internet is experiencing dramatic changes in usage patterns as users shift from fixed to mobile access and the volume of interactive and video content increases dramatically. Carriers, service providers, large enterprises and educational grids all face a similar problem: Exponential growth in bandwidth requirements that consume capacity as soon as they create it. Networks have to be able to keep up with volatile demand, avoiding network congestion while maintaining service functionality and profitability.

Take Back Control of the Network

The FortiCache Range of Appliances give you control of your network by enabling you to cache content and accelerate applications, thus reducing the impact of these new pressures on the network. The FortiCache high-end caching solution provides application caching for large enterprises, ISPs, mobile providers, telcos, universities and educational grids. By caching application content, organizations can reuse popular content rather than download the same content each time a user requests it.The integrated FortiGuard Web Filtering allows the network administrator to block access to selected content (e.g. adult content, malicious etc) to protect users or offer differentiated services.

Minimizes the impact of “Patch Tuesday” events by caching updates for what can be thousands of requests.

Bandwidth Reduction and Application Acceleration

The Internet is increasingly driven by short-term phenomena as news stories, sporting events, viral videos and games drive spikes in bandwidth demand. Interest in such content can spread within minutes, proliferate quickly and generate huge loads on the network. The result is congestion, latency and unplanned cost. By reducing the amount of bandwidth used, particularly during demand spikes, service providers and enterprises can deliver a higher quality of service to their customers, improve customer satisfaction, retain a larger customer base and ultimately drive profitability.

FortiCache Network Control

You may be battling against the continuous need to upgrade bandwidth and the associated costs. In some locations, it may not be possible to purchase additional bandwidth. In these situations, FortiCache can enable your organization to remove the need for costly upgrades and gain more performance from your existing investments.

FortiCache enables the network administrator to optimize and accelerate the network by keeping as much traffic as possible "on net" and thus decrease the utilization of valuable external connectivity. This allows upgrades to be planned strategically rather than reactively. FortiCache understands the delivery format of content delivery networks, enabling caching of dynamic, distributed and streaming video content, even if such video is padded with advertisements or the file is served from different locations within the Content Delivery Network.

Highlights:

Content Caching

Internet access is critical to the smooth functioning of any enterprise and latency or network congestion can disrupt business critical business apps. FortiCache acts as the enterprise’s network “memory”, remembering content and returning it locally rather than wasting precious internet bandwidth:

FortiGuard Antivirus and Web Content Filtering

Organizations of all types and sizes have a duty of care to protect users from unwanted content and to secure the network against malware threats. FortiCache helps achieve these goals:

FortiGuard Web filtering consists of 79 content categories in 8 groups, which can be filtered or blocked based on the user credentials. Additional features such as safe search enforcement and keyword filtering are also included.

WAN Optimization

Remote or satellite offices often suffer from latency to the head office network which results in excessive file transfer, open and save times and critically, frustrated staff. FortiCache WAN Optimization alleviates this with object and byte caching to reduce traffic between offices and datacenters and through optimization of “chatty” protocols. Such optimizations can generate significant improvement to network performance and improve staff satisfaction.